Kodi, formerly XBMC media center, released version 20.3 this Wednesday!
According to the announcements, this is the last release of the 20.x “Nexus” series. While Kodi 21 “Omega” now is in Beta 2 stage.
The release mainly includes bug-fixes and some backports. They include an assortment of fixes for Estuary, including home categories’ focus position, alignment of counter labels and Shift view for collections.
For gaming, the release fixed controllers not assigned to game ports correctly on Android, blue/pink washed out colours on Windows with 10-bit displays, and possible crash in Port dialogue box.
For Linux, it includes fixes for VP9 Profile 2 playback failure, and a leak of EGLFences in the DRM Prime renderer. Continue Reading…
For Chromium user, the popular web browser is finally to allow VA-API hardware decoding for video playback in Linux Wayland.
Chromium so far does NOT officially support VA-API Video Acceleration API on Linux. However, there are experimental flags to enable this feature, which might work on certain configurations, but without guarantees (See the official Docs).
This experimental feature however does not work in Linux with Wayland session. Meaning the most recent Ubuntu, Fedora, & other Linux with GNOME Desktop.
VaapiWrapper has been updated to remove the usage of libva-x11 and the legacy VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator, in favor of libva-drm only. This means now Linux Ozone/Wayland can share the same code path as Linux Ozone/X11. See CL:4938496.
This CL removes the remaining libva-x11 codes from Ozone and VaapiWrapper, and allows VA-API by default on Linux Ozone/Wayland.
Linux Kernel 6.7 is finally released! Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday night:
So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want
to delay this any further.
End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release.
The new Kernel release has many new and improved hardware support!
For Intel, the Turbostat command utility now supports Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake (15th gen) processors; LPSS (Low-Power Sub-System) driver now support Lunar Lake M processors; The Meteor Lake (14th gen mobile processors) graphics support now considered stable.
All the newest AMD Radeon RDNA2 and RDNA3 GPUs with Display Core Next 3.0 has Seamless Boot enabled.
And, NVIDIA has GSP support in the open-source Nouveau driver for initial GeForce RTX 40 acceleration support and improved RTX 20/30 series hardware support.
Folicate, the modern ebook reader, released version 3.1.0 with new features support.
It’s a free open-source reader written in JavaScript, and uses GTK4 plus LibAdwaita for its modern user interface, that works in most Linux Desktop and mobile devices such as PinePhone.
Folicate can open local ebook in EPUB, Mobipocket, Kindle, FB2, CBZ, and PDF file formats. It supports online digital libraries such as Feedbooks, Internet Archive, Manybook, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, unglue.it.
Lossless Cut, the popular free open-source video cutting/trimming tool, updated recently with full-screen support.
There are a few tools to cut out a fragment of a video in Linux, besides using heavy video editor application (e.g., Kdenlive and OpenShot). They include Video Trimmer, VidCutter.
However, Lossless Cut is my top favorite one! It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data. It’s extremely fast because it does almost direct data copy instead of re-encoding with the power of FFmpeg library.
For Ubuntu 22.04/23.10, Fedora & other Linux with Wayland, Shutter screenshot tool can finally take screenshots for selected area and app windows!
Shutter is (or was) an excellent feature rich screenshot tool, with image editing and uploading support.
It was one of my top favorite apps, but removed from Ubuntu repositories due to lack of maintenance. Though, it’s later added back to system repository, thanks to open-source community’s work by porting it to GTK3.
Scribus, the popular free open-source desktop publishing software, announced the new stable 1.6.x release series on the first day of 2024!
It’s been more than 4 years since the last stable 1.4.8, while 1.5.x release series is available as development branch.
The new Scribus 1.6 includes many new features! If you have the default 1.5.8 dev package from Ubuntu system repository, then most of them are already in use.
Features include:
Resource Manager for online resources such as dictionaries
canvas rendering improvements on Hi-DPI screens.
New commands added to scripting engine
New PDF-based output preview
Adobe® Illustrator® look like “Symbol” or clone feature.
Gnome Files, aka the default Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu & Fedora workstation, keeps moving with new features!
In the passed few month, there are minor but beginner friendly features merged into this popular file manager. They include “Enter Location” menu option, sidebar toggle button in sidebar, and badge icon to folder icon in ‘properties’ dialog.
NOTE: The new features introduced in this post are merged to master branch but NOT released yet! They may be available in next GNOME versions, backport to current, or even removed!
Alacritty, the popular free open-source GPU-accelerated terminal emulator, release new major 0.13.0 version few days ago.
The release introduced new features, including persist config option in hints config section, warnings for unused configuration file options, support for keybindings with dead keys, dynamically loading conpty.dll on Windows, as well as:
Back/Forward mouse buttons support in bindings
Copy global IPC options (-w -1) for new windows
Bindings to create and navigate tabs on macOS
Support startup notify protocol to raise initial window on Wayland/X11
Debug option prefer_egl to prioritize EGL over other display APIs
Inline vi-mode search using f/F/t/T
window.blur config option to request blur for transparent windows
--option argument for alacritty msg create-window
Support for DECRQM/DECRPM escape sequences
Support for kitty’s keyboard protocol
The release now uses TOML instead of YAML for configuration files. Run alacritty migrate command will automatically convert all the configuration files.
Other changes include:
Bundle mode-specific bindings in any mode.
Disable OSC 52 paste ability by default.
Deprecated draw_bold_text_with_bright_colors, key_bindings, and mouse_bindings.
SMPlayer media player released version 23.12 few days ago, with important bug-fixes and new API.
The new released fixed the compatibility issues when using MPV 0.37 as backend. They include video playback can not be resumed from pause, as well as the issue getting the audio and video codec on mpv 0.37.
SMPlayer 23.12 also implemented the new OpenSubtitles API. Since, the old API on OpenSubtitles.org is deprecated, and to be turned off by the end of 2023. If you use the service for getting subtitles, then it’s highly recommended to upgrade as soon as possible.
SMPlayer 23.12
For Ubuntu 23.10, the SMPlayer 22.7.0 installed from system repository, either freezes or pops-up following error on video playback:
“Oops, something went wrong. MPlayer/mpv has finished uxexpectedly. Exit code: 1”
The issue has been fixed in my test by installing the new version 23.12.
Other changes in SMPlayer 23.12 include:
Fix loading playlists with extension m3u8.
Fix video jitter/shudder when clicking on timeline bar.
Other bug fixes.
How to Install SMPlayer 23.12
The player provides official .exe for Windows, .dmg for MacOS, and .rpm/.deb/.snap/.flatpak/.AppImage for Linux, which as available to download at Github releases page:
For Ubuntu, user can choose to install the Snap package (run in sandbox), directly from Ubuntu Software or App Center. Or, use the official PPA (with ARM devices support) by running the commands below one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer
sudo apt update
sudo apt install smplayer
It somehow does not provide package for Ubuntu 23.10. However, download & install the package for 22.04 works good in my case in 23.10 laptop.
For Debian from version 8 to 12 (Bookworm), SMPlayer is also available to install in both amd64 and i386 through the OBS repository.
Uninstall
For Ubuntu user, depends on which package you installed, either remove Snap from Ubuntu Software.
Or, remove the .deb package by running command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo apt remove --autoremove smplayer
If the PPA was added, either remove it from “Software & Updates” tool under “Other Software” tab, or run command in terminal:
